Neil Fallon weaves a story like no other, frantically narrating the protagonist’s confrontation in a dingy motel room and the subsequent fleeing afterward, described during the trucking, double clutching stoner grooves of “Firebirds”. Starting out with some bottled lightning, Clutch lead off, after a short intro, with “X-Ray Visions”, which features an upbeat, rollicking approach to their grooving, bluesy stoner rock. While Psychic Warfare does have some moments of countrified desert rock, the album sees the band returning to familiar territory while bringing a diverse smorgasbord of tracks. The band released a few snippets and some explanations of the lyrical content, but the previews all carried a dusty tone, sounding like the wild west may have heavily influenced the band’s song writing this time around. Psychic Warfare, the band’s latest anthem filled opus, was produced by the same guy who took care of Blast Tyrant and Earth Rocker, Machine (who recently relocated, thus the recording location). While I really liked the straight forward rock of the last few albums, it was a little nerve racking to find out that the band was traveling to Texas to record their next album. The band’s work was still especially catchy, but it focused less on the Delta blues and grooving rhythms and relied less on Fallon’s Appalachian drawl. Subsequent albums, notably Strange Cousins From the West (2009) and Earth Rocker (2013) have see the band perusing a more straight forward, hard rock sound that seems heavily inspired by the likes of Thin Lizzy, while retaining just enough of that blues edge and Fallon’s trademark, tongue-in-cheek vocal delivery to sit well with the rest of the band’s catalog.
The years have been more than kind to the band, allowing them to hone their hard rock and blues amalgamation, with the sound really peaking with Blast Tyrant (2004) and Robot Hive / Exodus (2005). It was an album that reveled in simplicity and home grown, earthy tones, all driven forth by Neil Fallon’s swaggering croons. It’s been a long and eventful ride since then, but somewhere along the way Clutch fully morphed from a fledgling, groove laden rock band into one of the most prominent and dependable purveyors of blues-infused stoner rock.Ĭlutch really came into their own on The Elephant Riders in 1998, when the band added tons of blues licks to their grooving, off-the-wall stoner rock. I was first introduced to the band through their track “Escape From the Prison Planet”, which was featured on the Escape From L.A. The band met while in high school and has boasted the same lineup for their quarter century of existence, unless you count the original vocalist, Roger Smalls, who was never on an album or Mick Schauer’s brief stint as Hammond organ slash keyboardist in the mid 2000’s.
Maryland native rock band Clutch has kept onlookers and innocent bystanders in a trance since their 1991 formation.
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